Still, in certain of its ways, a charming tale about a loser in love.
Yet another unworldly intellectual goes off the deep-end with obsession for a mysterious girl who won’t return his affections but also just won’t get out of his life completely.
As far as university professors go, Jeremy Davenant is not the pick of the litter. A transplant to Montreal from a ruined English family, he was raised mostly by an eccentric Uncle Gerard, who once blindfolded Jeremy and had him find a book in Gerard’s library and tear out a page at random. Referred to afterward as “The Page,” this document (an S page from an encyclopedia) is supposed to chart out Jeremy’s entire life. For day-to-day affairs, it’s little help, of course, and by the time we’re introduced to Jeremy he’s teaching Shakespeare at a Montreal university—with forged credentials. Having just broken up with his girlfriend for no good reason, he’s also moved to the kind of bombed-out neighborhood where dreams of gentrification are far away and few. Not only that, but Jeremy chose the apartment building mainly for its proximity to the abode of a raven-haired beauty named Milena, who once sat next to him in a movie theater and has been an obsession for him ever since. Even though his extravagantly Oscar Wilde–esque friend Jacques has tried to warn Jeremy off his pursuit of the sullen, moody, and quite possibly gay Milena, Jeremy shambles on. Moore is best at detailing his hero’s haphazard woo-ing and generally sad-sack life. But whenever the story leaves the well-trodden streets of Montreal—described by Moore with an easy familiarity—or academe, it finds itself on less solid ground. Jeremy’s relationship with Gerard, especially everything regarding The Page, takes up far too much of the book’s already somewhat-too-many four hundred pages.
Still, in certain of its ways, a charming tale about a loser in love.Pub Date: May 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-14864-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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